State v. Peterson’s Empirical Analysis
1928
Citation profile
15 state decisions
How this case has been cited
Cited by 17 later decisions — most recently February 2019
15 state decisions
Later decisions citing this case, by decade. The current decade is in progress, and our corpus holds fewer opinions from the most recent years, so the latest bars are undercounted — not a real decline.
Relationships
Relies on State ex rel. Bolens v. Frear · State v. Russell · Biemel v. State · Rock v. Ekern · Smith v. State
Most-quoted passages
The sentences later courts lift from this opinion, ranked by how many decisions quote each — the parts of the opinion doing the work. These counts are smaller than the citation total above because most of the 17 citing decisions cite the case generally; a passage count includes only decisions quoting that exact language verbatim.
“In an early day in England private parties prosecuted criminal wrongs which they suffered. They obtained an indictment from a grand jury, and it became the duty and the privilege of the person injured to provide a prosecutor at his own expense to prosecute the indicted person. Our scheme of government has changed all this. It is now deemed the better public policy to provide for the public prosecution of public wrongs without any interference on the part of private parties, although they may have been injured in a private capacity different from the general public injury that accrues to society when a crime is committed. So under our system we have private prosecution for private wrongs and public prosecution for public wrongs. Our scheme contemplates that an impartial man selected by the electors of the county shall prosecute all criminal actions in the county unbiased by desires of complaining witnesses or that of the defendant.”
1 later decision quote this exact passagee.g. Kelsie v. State““It will be seen from these statutory provisions that the legislative scheme was and is that the district attorney shall prosecute all criminal actions in the courts of his county, and that where he is not able to do so for any reason the court shall appoint some suitable person in his place to prosecute. It will also be observed from the statutory scheme that it provides for every contingency that one can think of wherein the district attorney needs aid and where it may properly be given him and in what manner it may be given. In the prosecution of criminal actions the district attorney prosecutes for public wrongs, not for private wrongs, and such prosecution should be by a public officer and not a private party. This court has from its earliest days given full effect to our statutory scheme and has declared it to be the public policy of the state.””
1 later decision quote this exact passage
How this case has been treated — in progress
Whether each later court followed, distinguished, criticized, or overruled this decision. The treatment classification (task #35) runs highest-cited cases first and lights up here as it reaches this one.